Tag: gaming

Several months ago I read a posting for a job writing game scripts. I’ve read enough of the Internet to know that writing isn’t as glamorous as we hope. Writing is a skill and a talent. The technique of turning that skill and talent into cash is hard work. It’s a job.

I know nothing about game writing except game reading. I know that I gloss nearly everything in the script to find out where I need to go next, what I need to kill, or how many gold pieces it will cost me to armor up. All the other stuff is blah-blah-blah. However, there is still a plot. I have to feel like going from here to there and then performing some task follows a reasonable amount of logic otherwise I’ll just bail on the game even if I don’t read it.

The writer that answered that ad must do that plotting too–along with the crap dialogue I only scan–so I am still exposed to her output. I wonder if that plotting is different than what goes on in a novel.

Seems that in many ways it should be, but that when you know the whole game it probably isn’t. I suspect there are plenty of plots overlapping both temporally and spacially. I imagine there are a few missions that can occur at any stage in the game because they are above or aside the overall game. In these various raids your character earns hit points and experience points and money and plenty of other things for advancing his traits. I doubt he accumulates anything that disrupts the overarching plot.

A character never fails so miserably at stabbing Dastardly Wolves to death in the Growling Swamp that the various Non-player Characters stop offering him jobs to do. “Sorry Kyle of Blackwater you appear incapable of even the most trivial of tasks. I will wait for another Ranger. [OK]?” Or worse, “You’re the crazy man that walks into walls, stands as if stunned in the square, never eats or sleep, and the disappears for hours. Please go away. [OK]?”

But none of that was really where I meant to go in this. I meant to consider the style of writing. Is it like screen writing with EXTs and INTs? Is it like those second person “Choose Your Own Adventure”TM books?